This, ladies and gentlemen, is how science is supposed to work; when new information is learned, it’s supposed to be integrated in with what we already know, and anything that doesn’t fit with the new factual information is no longer treated as the truth. Consensus has no place here; if every scientist and non-scientist, save one man, agreed that the sun revolved around the earth, that consensus would not make it so.

Stay tuned for more exciting science; hopefully my theory about the aliens moving around asteroids in an attempt to flood island nations and cause unrest, with a side of green-helmeted UN peacekeeping environmentalists invading forcibly disarmed despot-ruled nations will prove to be true.

If that’s the case, then the rate of the sea level rise by itself doesn’t tell us much; what matters is the relative rate. If the basins are increasing in volume faster than the sea levels rise, then who cares about the rise in sea level? It’s not going to affect us at all. If the rates are the same, then the sea level will remain essentially constant. If the sea level rate is faster than the ocean basin rate, then rising seas could be a problem; but just giving us the rate of sea level rise by itself doesn’t tell us how serious the problem is. If the seas are rising at 0.31mm per year, and the land is rising at 0.3mm per year (note: these numbers are made up), then the actual rate of sea level rise isn’t 0.31mm/year, but is instead 0.01mm/year.

That’s a problem of an entirely different magnitude.

Which brings us to our quote:

When Al Gore talks about Manhattan flooding this century, and 20 feet of sea level rise, that’s simply not going to happen. If it were going to happen, he wouldn’t have bought his multi-million dollar mansion along the coast in California.

Or, as the Instapundit is so fond of putting it, “I’ll believe there’s a crisis when the people who tell me there’s a crisis start acting like there’s a crisis.”

Steven Den Beste (chance of NSFW pictures high) has written on this phenomenon at Hot Air’s Green Room a couple times now.

In Government By Wishful Thinking, he talks mostly about how this relates to politics, and one of the key quotes is regarding the anti-war movement from a few years back:

It was teleologists who were mainly involved in the anti-war movement about five years ago when it was at its greatest. I remember reading about how they’d have a demonstration somewhere. Lots of people would come out. They’d parade about carrying signs saying, “End the war!” Someone would burn a giant mockup of President Bush’s head. And afterwards they’d all talk about how successful the demonstration had been.

Successful how? It didn’t have any political effect that I ever noticed. The war didn’t end because of the demonstrations. So what was it that they thought was successful? Well, if you asked them they’d talk about how there was all sorts of positive vibes. How good it felt to be out there. And how so many people were feeling the same thing. Which sounds like masturbation, if you’re a materialist, but genuinely makes sense for a teleologist. They really thought that if enough of them got together and wanted the war to end strongly enough, it would spontaneously end. Not because getting enough voters on their side would have electoral consequences, but because the act of wanting it would directly bring that about.

In the more recent Wanting and Doing, Den Beste explains the president’s action (or lack thereof) on Libya from a teleological perspective:

For a teleologist, expressing your desire is how you bring about the event. If enough people say that Qaddafi “must go”, he will vanish in a puff of smoke. That’s why you work for a world consensus, for it is that consensus which alters reality.

(A slightly less implausible way to put it is that if there is strong enough international disapproval, Qaddafi will bow to peer pressure and voluntarily go into exile. But clearly that isn’t going to work with him.)

To a teleologist, it isn’t necessary, and it is obviously wrong, to use military force to depose a corrupt and brutal dictator. Soft power is obviously better.

Except for the minor fact that it isn’t very effective. But as mentioned, to teleologists, empirical results are not persuasive.

Like this:

Which of course prompts even more speculation that we’re not alone in the universe. After all, if there are planets like this relatively close, it’s likely that there are even more like this farther away that we can’t see yet.

And thanks to that asshole Drake and his stupid equation, speculation on the likelihood of intelligent alien life is sure to follow, with most people probably concluding that aliens are out there.

There’s only one reasonable response to this news; we must immediately begin preparations to deal with the inevitable alien threat to humanity.

Some people suggest that aliens will be peaceful; I doubt it. I think it’s far more likely that they’ll be agressive. An aggressive species would be more likely to develop the tech needed to get into space, and would need to expand (either for more territory, or to hedge against other factions) into space eventually; I don’t know that a peaceful species would have any reason to leave their home planet. What are they going to do, seek out new planets to be nice to everyone on them? An aggressive species would want more resources and more territory, and if we’re going to defend ourselves against evil resource and land hungry aliens, we had better get our shit together.

I don’t much relish the idea of future humans being enslaved by a race of galactic overlords; if anyone is going to be top dog (and someone has to be; a galactic UN seems incredibly unlikely, especially given how ineffective the strictly human UN is), I’d rather it be humanity and not the lizard men from the Horsehead Nebula.